Character Builds

There are a near infinite amount of ways to build your character in Dark Souls. With that being said here are a few strategies for building your character.

As you progress through the game you come upon items and weapons. A very big thing to do is inspect these items. Any item can be deadly in the right hands, this is how you find a weapon that will be deadly in your characters hands.

If you look at your character stats, there will be a symbol next to a stat. Such as an arm making a muscle for strength. A hand for Dexterity, a star for faith, and a lightbulb for intelligence.

Weapons have a grade system along with a minimum requirement system. The Grading system is used to tell you how much an increase in weapon damage you will get if you increase a certain stat (Str/Dex/Int/Fth) with A being the best increase and E being the worst increase. A blank means there will be no increase in weapon effectiveness when increasing a stat. If you focus on strength, a weapon that increases well with strength will be your best fit. But if you like dexterity, (bows, knives, katana, etc.) might be a better fit.

When you enchant or ascend weapons be in mind of your stats, and how the weapon uses those stats to make that weapon more effective.

Spells also become more powerful with more points, as the catalyst's also become more effective. Keep in mind the stats when leveling as it makes more of a difference in your effectiveness verse boss characters and the enemies in your current evironment (if in Blighttown, poision might be less effective, and in Demon Ruins, fire might be less effective...) so make necessary equipment changes to your environment as well. Some equipment is better used in areas due either to conditions or to creatures in that environment. Wearing the Helm of the Wise boosts curse resistance, which is a breathe weapon of basilisks in the depths.

Heavy Armor absorbs damage, and has stability (POISE) it also has high encumbrance.

Light Armor is very mobile, but lacks the damage absorbtion of Heavy armor. Though Light Armor takes damage, it also has higher resistances to Poision.

Robes are very mobile, have good resistances to magical types of damage, but also suffer the same fate as Light Armor in aspects of damage from physical sources.